Introduction

Glimpse is a debugging tool for every kind of ASP.NET application. There are plugins available for various systems, including MVC (different versions), ASP.NET, Entity Framework (different versions), ADO.NET. It behaves like a Firebug in Firefox or like any other web-developer tool, with the small difference that it displays all kind of server information.

System insight

As far as I have seen, Glimpse works with two modules. First, a HttpModule handles each incoming request and attaches itself onto various system components to grab statistical and informational data. The second module is a HttpHandler (Glimpse.axd) which handles the configuration and ajax callback stuff needed to display the information at the browser.

Also the HttpModule inserts the required html needed to render the toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

Interesting and useful code-snippets

Timeline Stopwatch

After using Glimpse for debugging a performance issue, I was in need of a piece of code to attach custom messages and time measures to the Glimpse timeline output. So I decided to create a small Timeline message handler including a stop-watch.